Beach Blondes: June Dreams, July's Promise, August Magic (Summer) (45 page)

Summer glared at him. “So you don’t even think about it? You don’t even care that when summer does end, you go one way, and I go another way, and that’s it?”

“What do you mean, that’s it?” Seth was beginning to look troubled.

It was a small victory, but Summer was relieved to see that he wasn’t totally obtuse. Could it really be that he was just now getting it?

“I mean, I’m in Bloomington, you’re in Eau Claire. Me in one place, you in another place. As opposed to now, when we’re together in the same place.”

“Well, jeez, it’s not even a hundred miles, and it’s highway the whole way,” Seth said.

“Oh, right. So in January when it’s two degrees and the snow is falling, you’ll be driving over from Eau Claire a hundred miles to take me to the homecoming dance?” Her sudden outburst of sarcasm shocked them both.

“I…I, uh, don’t have a car,” Seth admitted. “Yet.”

“You don’t have a car? Neither do I. Then how—”

They stared at each other until Seth looked away to steer the boat toward Crab Claw Key.

Summer felt deflated. Somehow, despite her worrying, she’d believed that Seth would have some ready answer to give her. Some reassurance, if only she continued to press him. But he had nothing. He was just denying the problem existed.

“Look, all we can do is try to work it out,” Seth said, kicking at a life jacket that was in his way.

Summer turned away and looked at the island. She could just make out the silhouette of the stilt house, dark against the bright water and the pastel waterfront homes. Her home—for now.

Somehow it will work out, she told herself. She couldn’t see how, but it would. It was not possible to believe that fate had brought her here to find Jonathan, only to make her lose her love. Somehow it would all work out.

Much later that night, late enough that it was really the next day, Summer found herself in a different boat, alone, it seemed. Sails billowed overhead, red from the setting sun. The sun was already low, bisected by the horizon, and Summer willed the boat onward, chasing the sun as it set in the south.

The sun doesn’t set in the south, she told herself. It’s a dream. Oh.

Pale blue storm clouds chased her, scudding across the water with frightening speed, as in a time-lapse film, racing clouds like horses galloping down from the north.

A new boat was there, pushed along by the clouds, skimming toward her. Standing in the bow was a small boy dressed all in white.

The little boy’s boat was fast. And then he was with her, on her boat, or she was on his, and he was standing, his bare feet—had his feet always been bare?—not quite touching the deck, as if he were floating there.

“Where’s the ball? The red ball?” Summer asked.

“I still have it,” he said.

“Are you a ghost? You must be dead if you’re a ghost.”

He smiled. “I’m a memory.”

“But I don’t remember you,” Summer said. “You were already gone when I was born.”

Then they were no longer on the boat. They were in the living room of Summer’s home in Bloomington, and her mother, her belly hugely swollen, was lying back on the couch (the awful old couch they’d had back then) while the little boy sat beside her and solemnly placed his hands on her stomach, feeling the movements of the baby inside.

A chill went through Summer. This was the closest she and Jonathan had ever come to each other.

“Are you dead, Jonathan?” Summer asked. Now he was standing in the grassy field, preparing to throw the red ball.

He threw it. It landed, bounced sluggishly, and rolled to the fence. The unseen man waited there.

“Jonathan?” Summer said. “Are you Jonathan?”

And then they were back on the boat, racing toward a dwindling sun, the clouds over them turning the sails dark gray.

“Who are you?” Summer demanded, her voice rising to a scream. “Who are you?”

But the little boy in white floated upward, arms outstretched, till he was as high as the top of the mast. Then, with a cry of perfect joy, he plummeted, sliced into the water like an arrow, and disappeared.

In the instant before he struck the water and disappeared, Summer had seen him change. His body was no longer the body of a small child, but of a young man.

She woke crying, sobbing uncontrollably. It had been a dream full of loss and sorrow, and her sleeping mind was unprepared for the onslaught of emotion. None of her defenses had been up.

She had lost Jonathan. She had never even known him, but he had dominated so much of her life with her parents—all the times she had come upon her mother crying silently in some darkened room; all the times she had found her father staring blankly into space, eyes filled with tears of guilt and sorrow. Grief for the loss of Jonathan had always been there, hidden by her parents to the best of their ability, but there all the more for being unspoken.

Summer had grown up dreading that grief, and yet never really feeling that it would touch her. Now grief came in a new guise—Seth. And she was walking toward it, unable to stop herself, heading toward loss and sadness.

Her parents had not known they would lose Jonathan. She knew she would lose Seth. Was it inevitable? Was there some quota of sadness that had to be dealt to every person? Was that just the way love worked? Because that was the underlying problem—without love, there could be no real pain. Love contained within it the seeds of loss and bitterness and grief.

She had known that. She’d known it, and had always kept her distance, but, trapped in the cave with Seth, when it had seemed the future was not going to be much of a problem, she had forgotten. She had let herself say the words to Seth. Let herself feel the words.

And now she was trapped. She loved someone she would lose.

Summer got out of bed and dried her tears, feeling cried out for the moment. She twisted her baby-tee around the right way and went to the door. She opened it silently, anxious to see a world outside of her dreams.

The sky was already gray in the east, and the stars had already retreated toward the west. She stepped out onto the deck. It was no more than eighty degrees, practically cold, with humidity like steam.

“Hi,” Diver said.

Summer was not surprised by his voice. He was above her on his deck, sitting in a lotus position, facing the east. She had long since accepted the strangeness of his sleeping out here, alone, uncovered.

“I hope I didn’t wake Frank up,” Summer said, nodding toward the pelican, who sat perched with his ridiculous beak tucked down low.

“No. He woke up earlier,” Diver said. “We heard you crying. In your sleep.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess I was having bad dreams.”

“Come on,” he said. He gave her a hand up the ladder. She sat beside him. The horizon was showing just the first trace of pink.

“You know this
wa
thing you talk about?” Summer said. “This inner peace?”

“Yes.”

“Mine is shot totally. Blown up. Destroyed. I have no inner peace,” Summer said. “I have no balance.”

Diver nodded. “Me neither.”

“You too?” Summer asked, surprised.

“Yes. For the same reason.” He watched the horizon glumly.

“Love?”

“Yes.”

“Diana?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

“So how is she? Diana?”

He shrugged. “I hope she’ll be okay,” he said uncertainly.

“She feels bad, doesn’t she? Like she was to blame for Ross?”

“It’s complicated,” he said cryptically.

“Everything is,” Summer agreed. She smiled sadly. “It’s a bad idea, this whole love thing. Totally disturbs your
wa.
”

“Yep.”

The sun appeared, a fiery yellow eye peeking over the rim of the earth. “I usually love sunrise,” Summer said. Maybe it was just the lingering sadness of the dream, but the rising sun seemed more ominous than welcome. “The start of a new day and all.”

Diver nodded. He seemed to be in tune with her mood. “Not every new day is good.”

“I have to do this thing today,” Summer said, thinking of her promise to go to J.T.’s. “It’s something I want and don’t want at the same time. Like hope and fear all in one.”

Diver nodded. “Well, I guess every day is like that. Hope and fear.”

Summer smiled. He was only pretending to pay attention. His thoughts were somewhere else entirely. With Diana, Summer supposed. At one time she would have been almost jealous. Now she was actually pleased.

“Every day may be like that,” she said, “but somehow I think this one is going to be a little more intense than usual.”

Across the bay, on the balcony of his downtown apartment, J.T. sat watching the same sunrise, having spent a nearly sleepless night. He had fallen asleep for an hour, perhaps a little longer, but then had been awakened by odd, disturbing dreams.

“Jeez, no wonder,” he muttered, taking a swig from a stale beer. He never remembered his dreams, but it was not surprising that he would have them, not with the day he was anticipating. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d had screaming nightmares.

He tilted the bottle up and drained it. He made a face and shook his head. “Yuck.”

He went back inside, grimly sure that he would never get back to sleep. If he got back into bed, it would just mean more of the same—playing scenes over and over in his head. Scenes he’d already played a million times.

He remembered the day he’d cut himself at work and had been taken to the emergency room. He’d been bleeding pretty dramatically, and the doctor had thought he might need a transfusion. He was blood-typed. A passably rare type. Fortunately his parents had been in the waiting room by then. The doctor had pulled their medical records, which were on file.

J.T. remembered the look on the doctor’s face. “Oh, you’re adopted,” he’d said. Why had he said that? Because the blood types didn’t make any sense otherwise.

Only, J.T. had never been told he was adopted.

He had tried to get a birth certificate. He had tried to find an adoption certificate. Neither existed.

J.T. got a new beer from his little refrigerator. And then Marquez had told him Summer’s story. About the brother who had disappeared sixteen years ago, just when Summer herself was being born. Jonathan, who would be the same age as J.T.

Blue-eyed, blond-haired Summer. Blue-eyed, blond-haired J.T. And, Marquez had said, she’d noticed times when J.T. and Summer seemed to feel the same thing at the same time, to say the same thing at precisely the same moment.

Probably just a coincidence.

Or else some strange fate.

He should try to sleep. He really should. In just a few hours, too few hours, he would try to learn the truth once and forever.

Who was he? Who were his parents?

No, sleep wasn’t likely.

J.T.’s parents’ home was over on the “new side” of the key, just a few blocks from the gate of the Merrick estate, on one of the canal-front blocks of nearly identical pastel tract homes. It was the sort of place where backyard barbecues were to be found almost any evening.

Summer arrived with Marquez in tow. And “in tow” was the right phrase. At the last minute, Marquez had tried to weasel out of it, coming up with a series of increasingly desperate excuses, including a sudden conversion to Judaism or Islam or any other religion that would forbid her to eat barbecued ribs.

“You’re going,” Summer had said firmly. “You promised J.T. Besides, you’ve been to his folks’ house before, so you know the way. It’ll be fun.”

“I could draw you a map,” Marquez offered.

But in the end, they had shown up in Marquez’s parents’ big old sedan.

The first introduction to J.T.’s mother was a shock. Summer took one look at her and wondered how J.T. could have failed to suspect long ago that this woman was not his natural mother. She was short, with dark salt-and-pepper hair drawn back in a bun. She was cheerful and greeted Marquez with a big hug. Summer shook her hand.

“Call me Janet, okay?”

She didn’t look like some horrible kidnapper, Summer thought. If she was the sort of person who would steal someone else’s child, she hid it well under a disguise of middle-aged normalcy.

J.T. was in the backyard with his father, already tending a pile of glowing coals. J.T. waved as the two girls arrived. He managed a smile, but it was a sickly, nervous grimace.

His father was a second surprise for Summer. He looked so much like his son, they could almost be…well, father and son. The same tall, thin body, the same blue eyes, so much like Summer’s own. Only, J.T.’s father had brown hair.

Summer tried to remember her genetics lessons from school. Was it possible for two parents with brown hair to have a child with blond hair like J.T.’s? It had something to do with dominants and recessives, but how that applied in this case, she couldn’t recall.

“This is my dad,” J.T. said, accenting the word
dad.

“Everyone calls me Chess,” he said.

Janet and Chess, Summer noted. Not exactly the textbook picture of deranged kidnappers. Suddenly the whole thing seemed utterly preposterous. What in the world was she doing there? Marquez was absolutely right. This was beyond nuts. This was a whole new level of bizarre.

Why had it not penetrated her mind what this might involve? So, Janet, Chess, are you kidnappers? Did you steal my brother?

She felt an edge of panic, which was not helped much by the fact that J.T. was grinning like a skull and giggling half hysterically at anything that even sounded as if it might be a joke.

“Oh, yeah,” Marquez said under her breath, “this will be fun. How did I let you two talk me into this?”

“My son the cook is handling the barbecue duties tonight,” Chess said. “Can I get you girls a drink? Iced tea? Soda?”

“Soda would be fine,” Summer said.

“Me too,” Marquez agreed. Then, after J.T.’s father had ambled off in search of beverages, she added, “Also perhaps some Valium, you know, just to make this evening at all tolerable.”

“Thanks for coming,” J.T. said, sounding way too sincere. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it, Marquez.”

“Summer said it would be fun,” Marquez said, giving J.T. a discreet kiss.

J.T. just looked grimmer still. “I don’t know about fun. I’m…I don’t know, I’m feeling like this is insane. Do you think this is just nuts?” He directed the question at Summer.

“No, J.T.,” she assured him. “I mean, look, you want to know. I want to know, too.”

“One way or the other,” J.T. said, “I’m not letting anything bad happen to my folks. I don’t care what they did sixteen years ago. They’re my folks. They’ll always be my folks. There are lots of reasons—I mean, maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe it was someone else who took me, and they just adopted me, not knowing.”

“They seem awfully nice,” Summer said.